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Hopefully, by now you are at least thinking about your Social Persona, and beginning to test the waters. This blog post is going to show you one way to begin getting real value from your SM efforts.

One of the most powerful uses of social media (and one that seems to get little attention from ‘experts’ and the press) is as a real-time market research tool. There are both active and passive ways you can use all the chatter out there to find out about your customer’s needs and wants, what they are talking about, and what they tell each other about your business.

Passive listening is akin to old westerns where the cavalry scout puts his ear to the ground and tells the captain how many horses are approaching and how far away they are. You can pretty easily “read” the social media sites to get feedback on what is being said.

Most social media sites have search features that you can use to see what is being said. Twitter for example has two: Trending Topics are displayed on the right hand side of the Twitter home page. These are the most used terms over the entire twitter network. They are not likely to be of direct use, but can give you a feel for the current “mood”. Twitter also offers direct search capabilities. You can easily search for keywords and see what tweets recently contained those words. With many Twitter clients (programs such as TweetDeck or Tweetie that add functionality to Twitter) you can see recent tweets locally, within a range up to 100 miles from your location. Certainly if you are a cabinet shop, this is a big feature. You can literally see what is being said about cabinets or remodeling in your own neighborhood.

Facebook is a bit different. You can certainly search, but the results will be pages from people or businesses, not keyword searches within the conversation. This is useful to find connections and build your network. And as your network grows, you can easily see what people in your network are talking about.

For those of you who do more B2B marketing, Linkedin has some powerful “listening” tools. There are numerous groups you can join (or even start your own) and receive regular updates on topics of conversation among the group members. There is a Question and Answer section where users post questions and other users provide answers. Keeping track of the questions being asked, and reading responses to questions in areas of interest, is a way to see current thinking and meet new contacts.

In the next post, I will discuss more active methods of gathering market information through Social Media. I encourage you to comment of this post as well as suggest ideas you have used!

I can be found on Twitter, (@Consultingwood) on Linkedin, (http://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphbagnall) or via email at: rbagnall@consultingwoodworker.com

I supposed it had to happen, although I admit I didn’t really see it coming. After several months of coaching and advising people on Social Media strategies here and on other venues, companies have begun asking me if I can help them with their Social Media and marketing. I don’t want this blog post to be a sales pitch, but one of the questions that needs to be answered is; “How do I choose a SM consultant?”

Social Media is so new, and evolving so quickly that there are no real certification or even education programs for you to rely on. So you need to be asking the right questions to find the right person. In my opinion, the first question to ask is how well the consultant in question knows your industry and your customer base. Nearly any teenager knows how to set up and operate the various SM platforms, but if they do not know what your customers are talking about between themselves, how can they advise you on how to communicate with them?

Another area to ask about is their writing experience. Most social media is, in fact, written. Poor spelling, grammar and syntax will reflect poorly on your company. An effective communicator is deeply important, especially if they will be supplying you with copy for your newsletter, blog or website.

And that brings me to the next point; as I have been extolling on this blog for some time, social media marketing is NOT just posting on a couple of platforms. You need to be managing a comprehensive campaign utilizing the correct platforms for your audience, and those efforts need to be cross-promoting each other, with the ultimate aim of bringing customers to your website.

Lastly, I firmly believe that when all is said and done, “Content is King”. I advise providing solid content to your customers on your website so they come back regularly to learn new things. You become a trusted source for them. But you are also trying to run a business in a very tough time. Will your consultant be able to assist you by helping you create good content for your customers.

So, if you are looking to hire a consultant for your Social Media Marketing, be sure to “interview” them, and insure that they will be a good fit for your company, industry and customer base.

Homebuilders Merging? Banks reporting quarterly profits? These and other signs have me convinced that the economy has hit bottom and on the rebound. The road back is going to be long and hard, and many more companies are likely to fall by the wayside. So while we should be encouraged, we cannot yet relax. I am convinced that American consumers will be a changed group after this recession. The freewheeling spending will not recover with the economy. People are already increasing their personal savings rates. This is, long term, good for all of us. But it will slow the recovery somewhat.

The economy that emerges will be very different from the recent past. Will you be positioned to thrive? What steps can you take to read the tea leaves and be properly positioned? I don’t have the answers and neither do you. But I know who does; Your customers and potential customers. They are the ones who will be buying new homes, remodeling their kitchens, and thinking long and hard before committing their savings. So, how can you forcast the new rules and be positioned to be their “go to” company? ASK THEM.

The future can be very bright for those shops that begin now having a dialog with their client and customer base. By working with some of the techniques I have discussed in past posts on this blog, you can keep up with the wants and needs of the buying public and the contractors that will be serving them. An effective Social Media presence on Facebook, Twitter, and other sites will give you a feel for what folks are talking about, asking for, and asking questions about. You can use these sites, or your own newsletter or blog to answer questions, explain trends and introduce new styles, hardware and features. As I have written about before, being a trusted source of information for your customers will keep you “top of mind” when they are ready to hire a cabinet shop.

This is NOT a fast and simple method, but it is really effective. As I have indicated before, Social Media is just that: Social! You cannot, and must not, treat the new media as another billboard. This is relationship marketing. You need to be friendly, helpful and informative. Don’t worry about spelling out everything you do. If you are seen as a reliable and trusted source of the information they need, they will be talking to you when they are ready to pull the trigger.

A really good source of information on this marketing technique can be found in Seth Godin’s book, “Permission Marketing”. (you can find a link to it at http://www.consultingwoodworker.com/recommended_reading) Seth has written the seminal work on using social media, even before social media was big.

I also want you to take a look at a pair of your peers, and what they are doing. Thomas Clayton, at Georgia Casework Inc., is writing a very good newsletter aimed at informing his customers about the market, his business, and the market. It is well written, very professional, and my only criticism is that there are no links to his website on the mailing. It would be worth your while to sign up for Thomas’s newsletter and see how he does it.

Paul Lesieur of Minneapolis Kitchen Remodeling writes a very entertaining blog at: http://www.minneapoliskitchenremodeling.com/ His style is breezy and a bit irreverent, but he absolutely comes across as an experienced professional. It should prove to be an effective resource for him.

Both of these communications have potential, but how do their customers find them? That is where the social media work comes in. If a Facebook “friend” asks a question that Paul has written about in his blog, he can provide a link. Not only will his “friend” check out the blog, but that person’s friends will see the interaction and may well check it out as well. Anyone who reads his blog can set up an RSS feed to have that blog sent to them automatically when a new post is made. They have given “permission” to Paul, to communicate with them, so as long as he provides useful information, his communications are not considered “spam”.

Thomas does the same thing, but through a mailing list. Everyone who subscribes to his newsletter has given him a valuable resource, their attention.

Both of these guys need to be very aware that the permission they gained is valuable and fragile. They must continue to be helpful and informative, and avoid being seen as a pushy saleman. The permission is very easy for the customer to revoke.

I hope that this gives you some ideas and inspiration. I also invite any of you who are producing content like Thomas and Paul to send me links, I’d love to see. I invite you to look me up in the Social Media realm. I can be found on Facebook and Linkedin as Ralph Bagnall, and on Twitter as Consultingwood. Come say hello and I will be happy to show you around.

I was going to write some more on using Social Media to connect with clients, but have decided to put it off a bit in order to share with you a unique experience I am having this week:

I write this from Kingston, Jamaica. I am down here working with Jamaica Fibreglass Products, my first and still favorite clients. This time, I am staying at a beautiful new facility in New Kingston. What makes this all notable is that I helped JFP create this room 18 months ago.

Back then, I was down here helping JFP figure out how to improve their CNC output and streamline much of their assembly. We began working toward a single unit production schedule, looking at new tooling and processes, and implementing the Lean Manufacturing techniques that I have been discussing in this blog of late.

The owners at JFP were also preparing for a meeting with clients about providing furniture for an upcoming hotel opening. While JFP is highly experienced at restaurant style seating, this was a pretty big departure from their normal business. Also, the client really wanted solid wood, and JFP is not really set up for large scale production in solids.

That is when the owners of JFP really started to impress me. They knew that getting the hotel project was a long shot. They could not offer the solid wood, and had no prior hotel work to show. They took a bold step and began prototyping the hotel room in full scale. When I arrived, they already had several pieces pretty well done, and were walling off a section of their lobby to replicate the room dimensions. I was able to contribute to the project by showing them how to use their CNC to miterfold the furniture parts, and adapting some of the designs to maximize the benefits of miter folding.

The clients, where ushered into the hotel room they had envisioned, sat on the bed, tried out the chairs, and really got the feel of the room. JFP did not have to convince the buyers that miterfolded furniture would look like solid wood, the clients could not ignore the parts they were touching.

Eighteen months later, I sit in the hotel and type this blog. I hope that you take the proper lessons from this unique company:

They decided to get the sale first, then figure out how to build the job. They could take this risk because they have structured their entire business to remain flexible. They know they can find a way, either in house or outside. That’s the second lesson:

JFP certainly does not suffer from “Not Invented Here” syndrome. They are willing to pay for outside expertise, and quick to respond to the fresh ideas presented to them.

And the last lesson is that they were ready to run with their plan. Completely on spec, they designed the furniture and began prototyping it. Since I was already there, they enlisted my help in detailing the construction to best utilize their capabilities. The client was presented with the exact design JFP was prepared to build. By the time the clients had finished moving the pieces around in the “room”, the deal was pretty well set, and here I sit.

This incident was not a fluke. JFP has gotten several large jobs since I have been working with them in the same manner. Does your company have the corporate mindset and will to go for the brass ring this way?

Isn’t it time?

JFP: www.jfpmfg.com
See the room here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/furnituremaker/sets/72157615520823654/

Ralph Bagnall
www.consultingwoodworker.com
On Linkedin
Follow me on Twitter as Consultingwood

Let’s face it. As woodworkers, and cabinet makers, we are something of an old fashioned bunch. If you have taken my suggestion from the previous blog post and delved into the world of Social Media, you may well be confused and concerned. At first it all seems sort of pointless and out of touch with our business. I’m here to show you that you are wrong. If you primarily work with designers, architects and contractors, it is highly likely that your current clients, and others that you want to work with are already on Social Media sites. Linkedin has any number of groups devoted to cabinet making, furniture manufacturing and other wood related fields. If your client base is professional, I highly recommend Linkedin. Linkedin is one of the most structured and formal sites. You have to ask people to join your network, and while there is a good search function, much of people’s profile information is hidden to you until they are a part of your network. A good way to get introduced to people and ask them to join your network is to ask and answer questions. Linkedin has a really big board of open questions being asked and answered by members. You can view questions by category, and by participating, you can build your network. Most folks are very polite on Linkedin, and will send you e-mail (through Linkedin) thanking you for answering or discussing your answer. This gives you an opening to then ask them to join your network. Since Linkedin is all about networking, this process is pretty painless. Like most Social Media, being helpful is the key to building a quality network.

If you work with homeowners, then you need to be working more with Facebook in my opinion. Facebook is much more of the social in Social Media. You can search people in many ways, and finding people in your geographic area is possible with most sites. A surprising number of middle and upper income adults are on Facebook. Facebook is a bit more open and freewheeling than Linkedin. Yes, your first impression is correct. There is a LOT on Facebook that is useless to you, but again, the point here is to be helpful and friendly and drive traffic to your website. Answering people’s questions about cabinets, remodeling, and hardware gets you a lot of exposure really fast. On Facebook, most interaction is VERY public. Every member has a “Wall” where things are posted publicly. People you have “friended” can write comments on your wall, and you can write on theirs. The really effective part is that you can read all comments on their wall, and your posts on their wall can be read by all their friends even if you don’t know their friends. See where this is leading? A polite, knowledgable person, being helpful to their friends online, can really help you build a reputation online as a go-to company.

Twitter is another site altogether. At first glance, Twitter seems totally useless as a business tool. I know, I thought that too. Twitter seems to be nothing more than people posting what their dog did on the carpet this morning. But it really can work for you. I have been surprised at how fast Twitter has been able to drive traffic to my website. Again, the point is to be helpful and knowledgable, and gain “Followers”, who in turn follow you. Twitter is fast moving and brief. All comments, known as “Tweets”, are limited to 144 characters. I use Twitter to broadcast new information on my blog or website, new articles as they come out, and anything that might reasonably be of interest or amusing to my followers. I also respond to others if I have useful information for them. Now as your number of followers grows, you will find that some post a lot of totally useless information and you can get hundreds of tweets per day. I, like you, really don’t have the time or desire to wade through all that flotsam. The good news is that you can simply not follow those people that fill your box with drivel. I follow anyone who follows me, but if they spend all day posting silly stuff, then you can unfollow them. 99 percent of the time, they will not even notice.
I have been able to winnow down my follows to those people that I want to hear from, people who are marketers that I respect, other woodworkers, NASA, the USS Constitution, and just some interesting people. By being helpful and knowledgeable, I have again been able to drive traffic to my site by assisting others and announcing new stuff that may be of interest to them. Just this past week, ShopBot posted a tweet praising last week’s blog. I noticed an instant spike in visits to my blog.

By now, you must have noticed a pattern to my advice here: Be helpful and knowledgable. Be polite and informative. Provide expertise and people will become comfortable thinking of you as an expert. They will visit your site, where they can learn of your services and how to contact you for more information. One more point: Social Media is SOCIAL. There are a number of companies out there that simply post several times a day with product reviews and announcements. They do not converse, they do not respond to others posting, they use their Social Media presence as just another advertisement. This is more harmful than helpful to them. People use Social Media to connect. Sometimes for personal reasons, sometimes for business reasons, but a connection is key. These sites should NOT be viewed as another ad space. I don’t sell on these sites. I build relationships, and when my connections ask, I will sell to them then. Seth Godin calls this “Permission Marketing” and it is very effective. It is not instantaneous, it does take some time and care, but it is free marketing, and over time is highly effective. You can find a link to Seth Godin’s book, “Permission Marketing” on my website, on the “Recommended Reading” page. It is a bit dated by now, but the pricipals are well worth knowing and studying.

Again I invite you to look me up in the Social Media realm. I can be found on Facebook and Linkedin as Ralph Bagnall, and on Twitter as Consultingwood. Come say hello and I will be happy to show you around.

You may have heard the term. You have certainly heard something about “MySpace”, “Facebook”, or Twitter. But these silly websites have no bearing on your business right? Wrong! You need to know about these social media sites, and you need to be thinking about how you might use them to build your business.

Forums too are a form of social media. WoodWeb offers a forum, as do most of the trade magazines through their websites. These are pretty direct ways to communicate with your peers in the industry. People in these forums ask questions, get advice, and even find cooperative work through these forums. It is a good way to stay connected to industry trends and network with others.

Which brings us back to the Social Media sites. Networking is the name of the game here. It is hard to quantify the benefits of expanding your network. I know by now, most of you who do not currently use Social Media sites are groaning inwardly; “I don’t have time to be keeping up with yet another website!” But if you target your efforts, and schedule your time properly, you can reap the benfits without undo time spent.

So lets look at the various sites and which might be relevent to your business. The most known site is MySpace. MySpace typically serves a younger community. I don’t post there, since my clients are business owners and woodworkers. Your target market is probably not there either. I do, however, recommend that you register on MySpace, just as a form of insurance. You want to protect your name online, so registering your company, even though you wont be using the site, keeps others from posting in your name. This is good advice even if you never intend to participate in any Social Media.

Facebook became popular in colleges around the country, and has expanded it’s membership over the years to include a great many adults. I have been surprised at how many of my classmate from high school (25 plus years ago) I have found online there. If your customer base is residential and you want to get information out to people in your area, Facebook may well be a good way for you to communicate with them.

Linkedin is a site designed especially for business to business networking. The rules are a bit stricter, but you can search and connect with people inside and outside your industry. I have met people there from IWF, from the trade magazines, AWI and other people I am happy to be in contact with. This is a good place for you to connect if you want to reach professional outside your normal circle.

Spend a few hours this week looking over these sites. At least register and reserve your name so others can’t. See what they offer, and in the next blog, I will discuss strategies for getting the most from them without spending a lot of time. And feel free to connect with me out there. I am on Facebook as Ralph Bagnall, on Linkedin as Consultingwoodworker, and on Twitter as Consultingwood. I would be happy to introduce you around.

Back when I used to sell woodworking equipment, I worked with customers to cost justify the machinery they were considering. The baseline was to ask how much it currently cost them to make a unit, or a particular part. What stunned me was how very few business owners could even guess at the cost, let alone give an actual figure. But cost justification of new equipment is only one reason to track your costs.
If you don’t very accurately know how much your products cost you to manufacture, you don’t really know if you are even making money on the job. If your costing assumptions are off, your bid on the next job might cost you plenty rather than making you money. You’ll have no idea which areas of your shop to look to improving, since you don’t know which operations are profit centers and which are money pits.
Tracking your time and cost gives you control over your business. If you know how much a cabinet costs to assemble, you’ll know which of your team are productive and which might need extra motivation. When an employee comes to you with a “money saving” idea, you’ll be able to properly evaluate it and make a decision to implement or not. Information is power, and this is the most basic information your company has. The good news is that the Lean techniques we have been implementing can help you gain control of this information.
To begin with, you have cleaned, organized and standardized your work stations. You have organized your hardware and fasteners and such, and may or may not have begun working in a unit flow. In either case, you can now begin to accurately figure out the time it should take to gather materials, fetch fasteners, drawer slides and such, as well as what all those items are costing you per job.
As you can see, breaking the entire process down allows for more accurate cost studies. Keeping track of these items from job to job leaves a paper trail that can be applied to future estimating, giving you an edge over your competition. You’ll know how to trim your estimate to the edge of your profit margin. You will also know which jobs to walk away from if the profit is not there.
The next part of this tracking is to begin recording the time spent in the initial milling of the parts, in edging and end boring, in assembly and in finishing. Each cellular step of the process should be tracked and quantified. This again makes bidding more accurate, and allows for more efficient application of resources. If you find that assembly takes twice as long as milling, then you obviously need to insure that there are two assemblers for each mill person. You will now know with more certainty how the shop time breaks down by procedure, which will give you much better insight into where to most effectively apply your capital budget. So, as you gain cost control over your materials and hardware, begin to create a time study history and use that information to best guide your business.
Next post, I’m going to discuss the debate between people and process, and why I am convinced that both is the proper answer.
As always, I invite you to comment here or by e-mail on this or any of my posts. I can be reached through Linkedin as well: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphbagnall

Assuming that you have worked your way through the shop cleaning and organizing the workstations, you can begin looking to the next stage, which is stock and outsourced parts.
How often do you find your jobs being held up because you don’t have the drawer slides you need? How much money have you spent on overnight or express shipping because you don’t have the proper hinges on hand when you need them? And are your outsourced doors and drawer fronts arriving too late, or so early that you are tripping over them while you build boxes? Do you order more screws only to find an unopened or half full box the day after they arrive? It is time to seriously begin to get your ordering and stocking under control.
A big part of the entire Lean mentality is Just In Time production. Now as a cabinet shop, you don’t always have that much control over your vendors and suppliers, but you probably have a lot more than you currently exercise, and there is a lot of money that can be saved by taking that control.
The very first step is to get your on site hardware situation in hand. Are your hinges, hinge plates, drawer slides and the like organized, easy to find and accounted for? Do you know offhand how many 110 degree Eurohinges you have? If your assembler needs to get two special hinges for the corner cabinet he is building, can he go put his hands on them in a few seconds, or is a big hunt going to ensue?
A well organized and marked hardware station can dramatically reduce the time needed to assemble cabinets and get them to the loading dock. If your assembler wastes even 30 seconds per cabinet finding hardware, that’s 15 minutes per assembler for a simple 30 cabinet kitchen. And that’s assuming that everything he needs is on hand. If not, how much time will he waste looking before he decides that there are none, then goes to ask someone else? You’ve all seen this over and over.
With your hardware organized and accessible, it becomes much easier to track what is on hand and what needs to be ordered at the beginning of a job. And this idea brings us to the next stage of getting Lean, ordering hardware and outsourced parts in a timely manner.
Often, when working up a proposal, cabinet makers will work by lineal footage of countertops, or some other “packaged” method of costing. The drawback to this method is that you must not forget to go back and count the slides needed and order them ahead of time. You also need to delve into the cabinets and account for slides for any pullouts and such.
I typically recommend my clients keep an inventory of commonly used hardware, and order each job as a deposit is received. This helps keep the inventory under some control and makes job costing more accurate. You should be doing this with screws, dowels and other common fasteners too. You know how many cabinets are being built in a job, and roughly how many screws each cabinet uses. A simple spreadsheet can alert you to when you need to order more and again, let you track actual costs.
As you can see, we are working our way through your entire operation and tightening up your command and control of each aspect. Next installment, we will begin looking at the advantages to building cabinets in a single unit process, and how it helps in job costing.

Time, in this posting, to begin closing the loop I began with the “What is Lean” posting. Over the next several postings, I intend to help you sort through Lean Manufacturing Techniques, and how they can apply to your business.
Lean Manufacturing seems on the surface like another business fad that gets lots of press and bluster, but realistically does nothing useful. (Can you say, “ISO 9000”?) But if you can cut through the jargon and dig out the good ideas, getting Lean can help you substantially.
I will NOT be trying to teach you terms like Kanban, and Six Sigma. The last thing you need is to try and learn a new language. I WILL try and help you find the gems contained within the jargon and use them to improve your business.
One last point before I begin: I’m very sure that there will be some folks who will condem the idea that you can take only what you want from Lean Manufacturing. Those deeply involved in the process are used to working with larger manufacturers making lots of very similar items. As a custom cabinet shop, each cabinet is an individual unit, and no two cabinets, let alone two kitchens are quite the same. You simply cannot impose a rigid control system on top of such a flexible manufacturing model. So we will go on, and decide what we want to take, and what we want to leave behind.
The first task in Lean Manufacturing is to realistically clean up each work area, sort through the tools and equipment used at that station, and organize the area and storage. Think for a few minutes how much time is lost each day trying to find tools, hardware, and parts. Work stations need to be clean and organized, and basic, regularly used tools must be close at hand to keep production moving along.
You need to extend this organization to the machines too. Each machine area is a workstation too. Any tools, lubricants or whatever needed to adjust, maintain or otherwise use the equipment must be close at hand. Take a look at your edgebander. Are the tools needed to tune and adjust it nearby? Do you have rolls of tape stacked and unraveling all over getting dirty and damaged? Are there convenient racks to hold the solid wood strips and the different glues? We have already discussed how much proper maintenance and tuning can improve your business. The tools necessary to quickly and efficiently keep the machine tuned and maintained must be close at hand and organized or operators will tend to skip or shortchange the schedule.
All this cleaning and organizing can be a VERY daunting challenge when you look out over the entire shop floor, but it really must be done. Start with one station at a time, and work your way through the shop place by place. Work with an incentive plan to keep the plan going. Each week, you can reward the crew from the cleanest station, or most improved or whatever. A public presentation of $10.00 per person, or a gift card or whatever, can reinforce the lessons. And as workers find how nice it is to work in a clean environment, with well tuned equipment, they should keep up the stations voluntarily, as well as pressure the slobs (like me!) to do their part.
In closing, I will ask a favor of you, my readers. I know how many folks are reading this on any given day, but I do not know if my readers are totally random, or if some are coming back to see where this blog is going next. Please feel free to comment on these postings, good or bad. Let me know if you are using the RSS feed, and I would be very grateful if you would drop me a quick line and let me know that you have come by and what you think. I promise not to use your e-mail address in any way unless you want me to let you know when new postings are made. I can be reached at: rbagnall@consultingwoodworker.com

As the economy tightens, and businesses look to cut costs, maintenance is often one of the early casualties. As with layoffs, I am convinced that this is a huge mistake. Maintenance for most of us is one of those nagging things like dental appointments. We know we should be doing it, but always seem too busy to properly keep up with it.
The truth of the matter is that maintenance is a really good return on investment. A small amount of scheduled time, and your production keeps running. A few tools and a bit of lubrication and you avoid replacing expensive parts. A few hours of scheduled downtime a year, and you can prevent thousands of dollars in service calls.
The damage caused by unscheduled repairs goes way beyond the cost of parts and technicians. It can be very difficult to truly calculate what is lost when your production is interrupted by breakdowns. There are the clearly visible costs discussed above, but the damage goes deeper. At best, you’ll need to pay out overtime to catch up to the schedule. At worst, you miss deadlines, and possibly lose customers. Lost customers are a blow at any time, but during a slow economy, it is a business killer.
Knowing that a proper maintenance protocol can save money, it is not hard to see how it can be a source of increased profit. While reviewing a client’s operation, I noted that 4 people were tasked to cleaning up edgebanded parts. I spent a few hours with their edgebander operators, showing them how to measure the stock and set the glue line properly, lube and adjust the trimmers, and keep the cutting tools clean. Without having to upgrade their old bander, one person is now tasked to checking and cleaning the parts as they come off the bander, opening up three others for assembling the cabinets.
Good maintenance also pays dividends in quality. A table saw that is clean and aligned accurately cuts cleanly, leaving crisp edges and fewer tool marks. And tools that work properly are safer for your workers, reducing lost time accidents, OSHA fines and lawsuits.
So how do you begin squeezing the advantages from maintenance? Every tool in your shop has, in it’s manual, a maintenance schedule. Compile that data for all your equipment. There will typically be daily, monthly, quarterly, and yearly intervals. Sorting through this information, you should be able to set up a schedule.
Maintenance needs to become part of your company’s culture, and that can only come down from the top. Workers need to know that you expect them to do their maintenance chores and do them right. That any time they find problems like loose bolts, they must take the time to get the proper tool and fix it, or find the person who can. Ultimately, they need to know that their job is not at risk for taking proper care of their machines, but at risk if they don’t.
So begin gathering your data, create a schedule, and devote specified time to keeping your equipment running safely, accurately and predictably. You will find that although counter-intuitive, you will likely realize savings rather than expenses.

Please feel free to comment here or by email. I’m presenting these ideas in the hopes of spurring discussion.
Email: rbagnall@consultingwoodworker.com
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ralphbagnall